Hasta La Ideas

I’m always looking for ways to save a little cash and to free-up storage space in the kitchen. Recently, while standing in the grocery aisle grumbling over the price of parchment paper, I realized that I was about to make a bad purchase.

For less than what I spend per year on parchment paper, I could buy two reusable Silpat silicone baking mats and simply store them flat in my cookie sheets. I’ll save money and storage space.

I can’t believe I didn’t think of this earlier. Now I’m worried there are even more obvious things like this that I’m missing. What substitutions have you made in your home to save money and storage space? Share your substitutions in the comments.

One of the things that my old kitchen was equipped with that my current kitchen doesn’t have is a tip-out tray immediately in front of the sink. My new home only has a fake attached front to a drawer that doesn’t exist. Instead of the decoration, I wish my new kitchen had a tip-out tray that helped contain our sponge, scrubber, drain plug, and garbage disposal allen wrench.

I’m not sure why all kitchens aren’t equipped with this simple solution. The tip-out tray is inexpensive and it serves a purpose. The fake drawer serve no purpose.

There are different size tip-out trays, so be sure to you measure before ordering. These 36 inch options can be cut to the size that you need, or they can fit a longer, single drawer.

Lifehacker’s Adam Pash tipped us off to an invaluable resource to use when cleaning out your refrigerator and kitchen pantry: StillTasty.

StillTasty’s tag line is “Your Ultimate Shelf Life Guide – Save Money, Eat Better, Help The Environment.” You can search for a specific food item, or you can browse through the categories to determine how long it is safe to keep a product. The site is easy to navigate and will keep you from wondering if the unopened bottle of ketchup is safe to consume.

There is also a question and answer section. My favorite question so far is “I Left Pizza Out Overnight — Is It Still Safe To Eat?” The answer: No.

The next time you clean out your refrigerator and pantry, keep StillTasty open to help you determine what can stay and what can go.

Businesses are working diligently to get consumers to spend money during the downturn in the economy, and are trying to lure them in with coupons and deals. As a result, clipping coupons has definitely become worth the time and effort.

Instead of using a traditional coupon organizer that requires you to pull out all of your coupons to see them, I’ve started using brag books (small photo albums) to manage my coupon collection. In addition to giving me a better view of my stash, brag books also let you have two to three times more categories than a regular organizers.

If you’re interested in creating a coupon organizer out of a brag book, follow these suggestions:

1. Track your coupon use for a few weeks without an organizer to see what types of categories you might want to create in your brag book.
2. When you make categories, label them with printed sticky labels or handwritten on masking tape. As you use your book, you may decide to move pages or rename categories — and removable labels will make this a simple task.
3. When you enter coupons into the pages, put the oldest at the front and the newest in the back. This way you won’t have to worry about coupons expiring.

The following are suggestions for ways in which you might set up your shopping categories:

• Review a map of your grocery store, and set up categories based on the layout of your market.
• Create large categories based on meal types (breakfast, lunch, dinner, desserts, snacks, parties, beverages, and condiments) and then subcategories within those types.
• Set up categories according to where you store items in your kitchen: pantry, refrigerator, deep freezer, etc.
• Use the good ol’ alphabetical system.

One coupon book might not fit all your needs, especially if you’re diligent about cutting coupons for non-food items. A second brag book is great for hardware, pharmacy, and other miscellaneous items.

How do you organize your coupons? Please tell us about your methods in the comments.

I often get requests from readers asking me to put together “bare minimum” lists. Lists that answer the question: How many items of X should I have and should I even have Y? I understand the desire for such lists — we’ve even written a few in the past — but they’re always met with mixed reviews. What works for me doesn’t necessarily work best for you.

That being said, I recently stumbled upon two great “bare minimum” lists for kitchen pantries in the Chicago Tribune. Instead of thinking about them as lists of must-have items, I thought about them as guides to figuring out what was clutter in my cupboard. If something in my pantry wasn’t on either list, I put it on the dining room table for further evaluation.

After this sorting process, I constructed a series of meals to use up the extraneous items. Most of these questionable items were nearing their expiration dates, too, so it made for a worthwhile activity.

Check out the lists and consider using them as clutter identification guides for your kitchen pantry:

• Dawn Jackson Blatner’s healthful pantry
• Mark Bittman’s healthful pantry